Pretty women tend to give birth to girls

LONDON - Beautiful women are more likely to have daughters than their plainer counterparts, says a new study.

Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics analysed data from a survey of 17,000 babies born in Britain in March 1958 and tracked them throughout their lives.

At the age of seven, their attractiveness was rated by their teachers. When they reached 45, they were asked about the gender of any children they had, the journal Reproductive Sciences reports.

Those rated as attractive were equally likely to have a son or daughter as their first child - but the unattractive sorts were more likely to have a son, according to the Daily Mail.

Put another way, the beautiful women were more likely to have daughters than those who were less blessed in the looks department.

A previous study of 2,000 Americans suggested that women are becoming more beautiful over the generations because attractive women have more children than plain ones - and a higher proportion of their offspring are girls.

Kanazawa believes that parents tend to produce children who benefit from their own attributes. Beauty, he says, is of more benefit to a woman than a man, and so it pays for attractive women to have daughters.

But couples blessed with strength and aggression rather than looks are better off having boys, as these characteristics are of more use to males, the study says.